9 replies to this topic

[aquatix]

Does anyone know of a good shopping cart that includes these features:

- php code
- support for authorize.net
- recurring billing support
- inventory management

I don't know if "free" is a possibility, but the cheaper the better. Thanks.

[GeordieSEO]

Try looking at OSCommerce

If you go to Sourceforge then and search for commerce you will come up with other free E-commerce packages.

[OldWelshGuy]

One of the better ones is oscommerce. easy to install, easy to use, easy to work with.

[K.S. Katz]

OSCommerce is the bomb. It's very customizable, has a search engine friendly URLs feature (that you have to turn on), and allows for all sorts of customization.

[Randy]

The main thing to worry about with shopping carts IMO is whether they are Search Engine Friendly or not. Sadly, none that I've ever see are 100% SE Friendly out of the box. Though you can get many of them to that point if you're familiar with the language they're contructed with and don't mind doing some tweaking.

As already expressed, OSCommerce is one of the best. It has a huge open source development community and tons of plugins available. And it's free. You just can't beat that! A really good choice if you're technically inclined.

I also have a site that uses SquirrelCart. It costs, but isn't too bad. Pretty flexible on being able to integrate it with your current design. No Cookie/SID/HTTPS Redirect issues, but it does have two modifiers which kept that low PR site from getting fully spidered. It wasn't too bad to fix though, I simply set up a little mod_rewrite and linked to those deeper URL's from a site map page.

Personally, I'm waiting for the cart that our own Grumpus is working on for my next shopping cart-enabled sites. He mentioned it a few weeks ago so maybe he'll give us an update. (pretty please!) I'm quite sure that it will be 100% SE Friendly and keep me from having to devote time to tweak something else.

[GeordieSEO]

The main thing to worry about with shopping carts IMO is whether they are Search Engine Friendly or not. Sadly, none that I've ever see are 100% SE Friendly out of the box.

I would disagree with this. Actinic 5/6 is very search engine friendly out of the box, if used correctly (depends how badly the designers hack up the template). Additionally, it generates the catalogue pages as static pages prior to upload to the server. It uses no session ID and only uses cookies once something has been added to the shopping cart.

I know of a lot of commerce sites which perform well on search engines which are produced in Actinic.

[DaveBeck]

Does anyone know of a good shopping cart that includes these features:

- php code
- support for authorize.net
- recurring billing support
- inventory management

Personally I have had a lot to do with osCommerce and absolutely love the program [has helped me learn a lot about PHP], but unless things have recently changed recurring billing is something that it doesn't handle. I'm pretty sure there been some modules made for this but unfortunately have not been released as a contribution.

a shopping cart to keep an eye on that is being developed by some disgruntled previous osCommerce core developers is Zen Cart™

while I haven't installed it yet, I have seen some of the work of these guys have done while still with osCommerce and it should be a nice solution. Don't know about compatibility with search engines!

[Randy]

Point taken Geordie. I've never used Actinic myself myself, so can't speak to it. From what you've said though it certainly sounds like it'll be SE Friendly.

How does it do with Titles and such on the product pages? Something generic or does it pull from the product description? Sounds like one I might have to check out sometime.

I must add, that it's heartening to me to see many more shopping cart developers are taking SE visibility into account these days. It'll be so nice when we don't have to spend 10 hours tweaking code just to get spidered.

[GeordieSEO]

Unless it is changed in the template for each page in the catalogue the Title Tag is of the form Company Name Section Name

The company name is setup in the business settings in the catalogue, although if the name is too long I change the template to something shorter.

Then it is simply a case of setting the section names to be keyword rich.

When creating a section there are two boxes for filling in the Meta Description and Keywords tags.

It's quite easy to add dummy products to act as information / sales pitch to a section. Each product has an area for text associated with it.

[Cognitivecreations]

Oscommerce is great. I currently own 2 sites that use it and have installed it for several people. AABox has a premade version that includes 30 some odd packages already included. They also have a version you can download for free. Look for the download link at the bottom of the page. It is at the following location OSCommerce MS2-MAX. And lastly is the documentation site. osdox.com. This leaves a lot to be desired but it is some help.

The major part about this is they have added an option that is search engine friendly. I have watched the results of Google as reported in the Apache Logs and it seems to work properly.

With the modifications they have included you can have a site running quickly that includes most everything you could want.

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Edited by Jill, 20 March 2004 - 09:38 AM.